I am scared.

 

I am scared.

I am scared of heatwaves. I am scared of the heatwaves of today and of the heatwaves to come. I am afraid of not being able to sleep, of mosquitoes, of melting electricity cables.

I am scared of forest fires. Beside destroying entire villages and burning trees, animals and the soil, forest fires roast human beings. Those people that are roasted are someone’s mother, someone’s nephew, someone’s friend from primary school.

I am scared of climate migration.

I am scared of climate migration. 

Look at Afghanistan’s chronic droughts. How the US occupation and their collaborator governments ignored it, and how the rural populations were abandoned during decades. Look at where that took the country, and look at how the US sanctions will take it forwards.

Look at Syria. A drought that started in 2005 reached its peak in 2007, when all the farmers lost their harvest. The drought continued intensifying. In 2008, they lost their seeds. In 2009, they lost the soil. In 2010, urban areas were flooded by domestic migrants. In 2011, the Syrian uprising started due to housing and food prices. In a couple of years, the country was filled with invited foreign armies, uninvited foreign armies, paid recruits of CIA, paid recruits of the Pentagon, paid recruits of the Turkish foreign ministry, and to top it all the Islamic State. 

Many people in Afghanistan and in Syria left their homes in search of a better life.

Such coherent stories of the climate collapse are rare. Reality is convoluted. 

In Southeast Asia, it’s mostly the floods driving the migration. In Africa, it’s the droughts combined with the violence of the private armies of colonialism protecting the fossil fuel industry. In South America, droughts are accompanied by the paramilitary structure of the extractive industries. In Yemen and Palestine, the story is one of pure evil.

In all these places, people fight. They fight for their rights and for freedom. Look at Myanmar. Look at Sudan. Look at Chile. Look at Sri Lanka. People die fighting in the streets.

In all these places, some leave – as engineers in Portugal do or as in medical doctors in Turkey do – in search of a better life elsewhere.

I am scared of climate migration. And the climate migrants are scared too. There is generally a language barrier. There is incomprehensible bureaucracy to integrate into. There are precarious conditions at work, if any.

The left has been ignoring the fear at the receiving end of climate migration. That’s a dead end. Migrants end up in a lower income stratum than their country of origin, which frustrates them. They are available to live below the socially accepted poverty line, which frustrates the poor. Many migrants are men, so they are self-entitled to women’s bodies (as are the men in the receiving country). This is not about whether migrants, “they”, are better or worse than “us”. A massive increase of the lowest strata of a society means increase in crime, conflict and unrest. That’s what poverty and inequality does to any society. This is not to say anybody should refuse or deport migrants. But we have to stop ridiculing the fear. The fear is real, well-founded and rational. We need that fear to fight the climate crisis.

I am anxious.

People ask me what my vision is. What kind of new society do I imagine. I struggle with that question.

I answer: Peace. My so-called “vision” is being able to go to the beach and calmly watch the waves. Or go to a park and watch the clouds. Having a nature walk in a weekday. Preparing lunch without worrying about the dinner. Walking on the street without being assaulted, harassed or raped.

Our current path is that these are our best days for generations to come.

My bet is that we abort that path.

People ask me about my vision. They want me talk about voluntary simplicity, about degrowth, about connecting with the Earth, about total freedom. It’s nice to have dreams. But my vision is not climate denialist. We will either do zero emissions by 2030 in the Global North, or we are fucked. Current pathways of the EU would reach net zero emissions by 2060. That’s 38 years from now, instead of the 8 years missing until 2030. That’s an error of 375%. I have no energy to dream of utopias.

I am in denial.

I have a vague understanding of what is at stake. The climate collapse is beyond the cognitive capacities of our species. 

The recent news of floods, fires and storms are all “biblical”, in the sense that they were so rare and so irrational for past generations that they would produce entire religions and corresponding prophets. The only rational explanation for such devastation was divine punishment. Now, that’s monthly news. 

We are not ready. Our minds refuse their actual meaning. Our bodies cannot handle it. Our continuation of our own business-as-usual (going to work, paying for our pension funds, or some other normal activity) is denial as cognitive adjustment. It’s natural. And it’s also natural to reject it.

Your emotions are correct.

Some tell me I shouldn’t scare people. Some tell me we should give hope.

I am here to tell you that your emotions are correct. We are afraid, we are anxious, we are angry. Those emotions tell you that you are alive. Act on those emotions, otherwise you will be consumed by them.

Your anger tells you to draw boundaries and re-institute justice. Your fear tells you to take action to protect yourself and those dear for you. Your anxiety tells you to prioritize and plan. Follow those emotions. They will take you by hand and bring you to the movement.

We need prophetic action.

The proposals of the climate movement may look ridiculous to you at first. That’s true. We are so close to irreversible civilizational collapse and our societies are so handcuffed by corporate power, that we really need to change everything. We live in biblical times that cross our cognitive limits. It’s just natural that the proposals are also prophetic.

We need an ecofeminist communism.

We need communism, in the sense that we need to end private property of the means of production. Capitalism is fine with gender equality, with green economy, with legislative elections every now and then; because it can adapt and co-opt to these. Abolishing private property of the means of production is the ultimate taboo for the system, because it actually threatens the core of it. Nothing less than this will save us.

We need an ecofeminist communism, recognizing as the revolutionary subjects all those who don’t own the means of productions and who need to work to live. These people confront the capitalist exploitation on a daily basis, at the workplace, at home, in their territories.

We need an ecofeminist communism informed by the climate deadlines. We have to learn how to understand “socialism or barbarism”, because we have never been this close to its literary meaning. 

There is a slogan that goes “The struggle continues.”, we have to fight that slogan. We have to fight against that slogan. We have to fight against the conformism implicit in that slogan, insisting on a state of climate emergency.

I propose.

Take your fear with you. Put your anxiety in your pocket. Dress up your anger.

I am not just “agitating” you.

I am offering you a way out. I am proposing a sound, coherent, complex plan to act on your emotions.

If any of this touches you, talk to me.

Afghanistan and the climate crisis: https://annebonnypirate.org/2021/09/15/weaponizing-climate-change-in-afghanistan/

Syria and the climate crisis: https://www.carbonbrief.org/scientists-discuss-the-role-of-climate-change-in-the-syrian-civil-war/

Ecofeminism and class: https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/abs/forces-of-reproduction/BE9B0DBDC89593F3284FE3F51D3B0418